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College of Pharmacy

Drug Design and Synthesis Core (DDSC)

The Drug Design and Synthesis Core provides access to state of the art resources for computational structure and ligand based design and synthetic organic chemistry.

The DDSC will work with researchers to evaluate the feasibility of drug discovery and design projects with the following applications and services:

Drug Target and Mode of Action types

  • Small molecule enzyme inhibitors: kinases, phosphatases etc.
  • Protein – protein and protein – nucleic acid interactions
  • antibody-drug conjugates

Our Services

  • evaluation of potential targets for “drugability”
  • ligand and structure based virtual screening to identify initial hits for drug discovery
  • In silico prediction of pharmacokinetic and ADME properties.
  • Synthesis of small molecule, peptide and peptidomimetic compounds
  • Structure based design to optimize ligand affinity, cellular activity and drug-likeness.
  • Library design and synthesis to evaluate structure-activity relationships.
  • Isolation and purification services.
  • Design and synthesis of antibody-drug conjugates.

Facilities and Equipment

  • 1200 Sq. Ft. Fully equipped Synthetic Chemistry laboratory
  • Waters Fully Automated Mass Directed Preparative HPLC system.
  • Biotage Automated Flash Chromatography system.
  • Protein Technologies 6 channel fully automated parallel peptide and solid phase organic synthesizer.
  • Chembridge “DIVERSet” compound collection for compound screening
  • State of the Art Molecular Modeling/Computational Chemistry Software and Hardware for Ligand and Structure Based Molecular Design.
  • Access to USC high performance computing facilities for docking of virtual molecular libraries of zinc database (35 million purchasable compounds).